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That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
Archibald MacLeish
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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Expectations
Bookish
Atheism
Compels
Disease
Infatuation
Experience
Intellectuals
Ideas
Expense
Conform
Expenses
Peculiar
More quotes by Archibald MacLeish
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
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What happened at Hiroshima was not only that a scientific breakthrough had occurred and that a great part of the population of a city had been burned to death, but that the problem of the relation of the triumphs of modern science to the human purposes of man had been explicitly defined.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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A poem should not mean but be.
Archibald MacLeish
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
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Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.
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What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
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Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
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A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
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Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them new and born and fresh and wonderful.
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Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
Archibald MacLeish
The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
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A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Archibald MacLeish
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
Archibald MacLeish
